Founded in 2005 by Babson College in collaboration with six academic affiliates in Europe, the STEP Project is a global applied research initiative that explores the entrepreneurial process within business families and generates solutions that have immediate application for family leaders.

The visionary institutions that founded the project include ESADE (Spain), HEC (France), Jönköping International Business School (Sweden), Universita Bocconi (Italy), Universitat St. Gallen (Switzerland), Universitat Witten/Herdecke (Germany), and Babson College (USA).

Families are the dominant form of business organization worldwide—they play a leading role in the social and economic wealth creation of communities and countries. To achieve continued growth and continuity, they must pass on the entrepreneurial mindsets and capabilities that enable them to create new streams of wealth across many generations—not just pass a business from one generation to the next. We refer to this practice as transgenerational entrepreneurship.

Leading academics and business families from around the world have joined as partners of the STEP Project to explore Successful Transgenerational Entrepreneurship Practices and create a stream of powerful practices and cases that empower families to build their entrepreneurial legacies.​

​The STEP Project for Family Enterprising is the first global research study to foc​us on entrepreneurship in business families. For further information regarding STEP,
please visit our website.

“The success of achieving multi-generational status is an inherent challenge for family businesses. The unique fusion of theory driven, evidence based research derived from the STEP Project in the areas entrepreneurship, innovation and strategic change has been hugely insightful for our team of scholars. Such rich theoretical and practical findings have allowed us to impart best practice insights to the family businesses we seek to serve. Through engaging in the STEP Project our family business practitioners have gleamed rich insights on their unique pool of resources and entrepreneurial tendencies, both past and present. In particular, many of our ‘next generation’ family business members have leveraged their STEP case studies to identify the firms idiosyncratic strategic advantage.”